About

What are Basement Stories?

Basement Stories are stories that you don’t want to believe but know to be true, stories you whisper to your kid sister at two in the morning in the dank dark moldy basement of your parent’s house, stories that you wish were true but know aren’t. Basement Stories are the stories you wake up dreaming, the really great ones that fade within a couple of seconds.

Basement Stories is a diatribe against the ordinary and the mediocre. We believe that there’s room in everyone’s life for the fantastic, the unbelievable, and the wonderful. The staff of Basement Stories have all, at one point or another in their lives, worked as readers for various magazines, from the great and terrible literary giants of the midwest to the tiny leak zines of undergraduate schools across the land, and watched fantastic, brilliant, daring, soaring stories get rejected because they didn’t work fir the magazine in question. And that’s a damn shame.

We plan on publishing an issue once a quarter, with our first issue coming out on July 15, 2010. We realize that a non print publication having a quarterly print schedule sounds a little absurd, but we’re dedicated to paying all of our writers, and that means that we’ll have to take breaks between issues to raise funds. All content will be available on this site as well as in a pdf form for those who want to print it out and cuddle with it. In some bright distant future we’d love to have a print version as well, but that’s unlikely because, as well as the title “Basement Stories” having all kinds of special symbolic meanings, we’re running this thing out of our basements.